Orthodox Reflections

Since laws and constitutions are at the center of political life in the US, tradition is supremely important.  Without a stable and coherent lens through which we can all understand the meaning of the words and phrases of those documents, rulings, etc., there is no possibility of a peaceful, settled society.  Michael Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center makes this point well in the context of the federal constitution (but it applies equally well to State and local charters, too):

Reading an 18th-century legal document with a 21st-century understanding of the words can quickly lead you way off the reservation. After all, the meanings of words can and do change over time. James Madison warned what would happen if we took this approach.

“If the meaning of the text be sought in the changeable meaning of the words composing it, it is evident that the shape and attributes of the Government must partake of the changes to which the words and phrases of all living languages are constantly subject. What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense!”

In other words, in order to understand the Constitution, you need a coherent framework through which to read it.

The only way to understand the original, legal meaning of the Constitution lies in a process known as “originalism.” To read the Constitution through an originalist framework means we seek to determine how the people who ratified it and put it into legal effect understood it at the time. In other words, we adhere to what they said they were agreeing to.

Otherwise, as Madison warned, the meaning becomes a moving target, subject to the changes in language and societal assumptions over time.

Thomas Jefferson summed it up succinctly.

“On every question of construction let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”

But the political is always bound up in the religious.  For there to be a strong, healthy political tradition, there must first be a proper religious tradition underlying it.  For instance, we would not be concerned about preserving the various strands of the political tradition here in the States – from the ancient Greek and Roman practices to English common law and French capitularies and statutes to the laws of Constantinople/New Rome and the Holy Scriptures – if Darwinian evolution were the reigning religion.  In that scheme, nothing is stable; everything is in a constant state of change.  If a fish can become a bird, or a bacteria an insect, then a law can mean one thing one day and a completely different thing the next, and a consistent evolutionist would be quite happy with both developments.  (To speak briefly of other religions:  Transformations abound in Hinduism, and Islam is radically nominalist, which means very little has a fixed form in either of them, too.)

In Christianity, this is not the case.  There is a God Who does not change, Who ‘is the same yesterday and today and forever’ (Hebrews 13:8), a God who gave a fixed Tradition to the Holy Apostles, which they have passed on to us.  St Jude speaks of ‘the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints’ (Jude 3), while St Paul writes, ‘So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter’ (II Thessalonians 2:15).

But not everyone in Christendom has been a faithful guardian of the Holy Tradition given to the Apostles.  Most Protestants consider ‘tradition’ to be a dirty word, and as a consequence they go through life quite rudderless, inventing new teachings, denominations, and practices of public worship and private devotion with troubling regularity.  Even the Protestants who approach Tradition with the most seriousness, the Anglicans/Episcopalians, because of their inconsistencies and vagaries, are not trustworthy custodians of it.  A letter of the tireless Orthodox missionary and Archpastor, St Rafael of Brooklyn (+1915), goes into more detail on that for those interested.

So we are left with Roman Catholics and the Orthodox as candidates for the proper custodians of Tradition.  How shall we decide?  Traditional Catholic Jeff LeJeune helps us to do so via his essays on the Fatima apparitions at The Hayride.  In one he remarks:

Over a century ago today in Fatima, Portugal, a heavenly visitor to our humble earth–the Blessed Virgin Mary–began a series of appearances that would predict world happenings still years and decades away. She would predict the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union seven years before the Bolshevik Revolution ended. She would predict the Great War would end, now dubbed “World War I,” but that a greater one would emerge–if people didn’t repent–at the end of the 1930s under the reign of the very Catholic pope who ended up being elected.

And 70,000 would witness confirmation of all of this on October 13, 1917.

At this time, World War I was still raging, and the Russian Civil War was breaking out. The heavenly visitor asserted that Russia would be the instrument through which God chastised the world for its sins. Russia would spread its “errors,” she said, an indication that the bloody twentieth century would be on Communism’s hands. She predicted that wars and persecutions would be unbridled and that nations would be annihilated.

Let’s examine this from the more secular, geopolitical angle first.  Jay Dyer, one well-versed in history, politics, and theological writings like Mr. LeJeuene, provides this material.  He writes,

My stance on this event is also not intended to be the standard, fundamentalist evangelical “debunking,” but rather to look at the larger geo-political setting that surrounds Our Lady of Fatima.  Although I am not a Roman Catholic, the goal here is not to promote Enlightenment rationalism, but rather to propose an espionage-based thesis for the so-called “revelations.”  The first place we want to look is Dr. Carroll Quigley’s revelations based on CFR private archives in regard to the banking houses of New York, London and Europe being the source of the 20th century’s world wars – world wars are banker’s wars. . . .

For those that have spent a lot of time in Tragedy & Hope, you know the first hundred pages or so are about how awful Russia is.  This is because in the classic “Great Game,” the perennial enemy of the Anglo-American Establishment (another book title by Quigley) is Russia.  The only power that could rival the merchant sea power (England), is the great land power, Russia.  Other works like Gould and Fitzgerald’s Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Mark Curtis’ Secret Affairs also discuss at length the classic rivalry of these two powers, giving us a wider picture of the historical setting for the First and Second World Wars.

As we know from the works of Antony Sutton (as well as Quigley), the banking houses had an invested interest in funding both Bolshevism and Nazism for the purpose of reorganizing the various continents into large trading blocs with, first, a League of Nations following World War I, and a United Nations, following World War II.  The Vatican Bank had also been in the service of the Rothschilds since the 1800s.  The Jewish Encyclopedia states of the Rothschilds:

“After various vicissitudes, graphically described by Zola in his novel “L’Argent,” the Union failed, and brought many of the Catholic nobility of France to ruin, leaving the Rothschilds still more absolutely the undisputed leaders of French finance, but leaving also a legacy of hatred which had much influence on the growth of the anti-Semitic movement in France. Something analogous occurred in England when the century-long competition of the Barings and the Rothschilds culminated in the failure of the former in 1893; but in this case the Rothschilds came to the rescue of their rivals and prevented a universal financial catastrophe. It is a somewhat curious sequel to the attempt to set up a Catholic competitor to the Rothschilds that at the present time the latter are the guardians of the papal treasure.

Of recent years the Rothschilds have consistently refused to have anything to do with loans to Russia, owing to the anti-Jewish legislation of that empire, though on one occasion the members of the Paris house joined in a loan to demonstrate their patriotism as Frenchmen.”

This would suggest the co-opting of the Vatican was much earlier than the Vatican II conspiracy most traditional Catholics adhere to.  The anti-Russian stance thus suggests a specific anti-Russian bias that continues today, as the mega banking houses of our day are still embroiled in Vatican Bank scandals, recalling the ritual death of Roberto Calvi and John Paul I.  With this geopolitical setting in mind, we can consider Fatima within this milieu and my thesis is as follows:  The Western Atlanticist powers had planned World War I and II, and the miraculous “revelations” of Fatima specifically target Russia as the villain that will “spread her errors” to the globe.  As Sutton and Quigley detail, funding for world communism and fascism came from western capital.

The “errors” here are the spread of communism, but why didn’t the prophetic gift enable to children to understand that London exported Marxism to Russia?  What about London spreading her errors to the globe, with international finance and industrial powers funding both Nazism and communism?  No, the peasants specifically target Russia as the villain, conveniently the Atlanticists’ enemy number one.  And what better way to mobilize a billion Catholics to target Russia as the global enemy according to Mother Mary, when Bolshevism and communism wrecked Russia by Great Game design?  This is not to say the Cold War and east/west espionage weren’t real – the wars and covert operations are very real, but are war gamed at a higher level by powerful internationalists.

To further bolster my thesis, I dug up a fascinating scholarly essay on “CIA Psychological Warfare Operations in Chile, Nicaragua and Jamaica” that delves into minute precision analyzing various CIA PSYOP tactics in these nations that specifically utilize the manipulation of various Marian “apparition” superstitions amongst the local populations.  Although from somewhat of a leftist bent, the article by Fred Landis explains various CIA fronts planting several “miraculous” stories in the news, creating a fake Lourdes for local that would propagandize, the appearance of Mary to various ministers, as well as numerous other faux miracles invented for psy ops.  My first thought reading this important article was the famous quote of Machiavelli in his Art of Warthat a staged miracle is a great way for a general to mobilize his troops (Book VI) – and keep in mind that the British Empire made liberal use of Machiavelli.

While I recognize the CIA operations against Marxists were much later than Fatima, it shows there has been precedent for military and intelligence operations staging miracles to mobilize a population. I am also not supporting the Marxists against the CIA, but rather using the article as an example.  In my estimation, it is far more likely the machinations of Rome in the clutches of the Atlanticists were prepared to go along with a Fatima PSYOP to prepare for an already-planned World War I and II, which is why Benedict XV was a supporter of the bankster’s League of Nations (and why the present popes are lovers of the United Nations).

(For more on the attempts of the US intelligence apparatus to weaponize religion, we highly recommend these two videos by Jay on Graziano’s book Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors.)

The material of Mr. Dyer casts some doubts on Fatima, and a more purely theological examination casts more.  The Orthodox Miriam Lambouras is very helpful in this regard.  In a detailed essay, she looks at many of the Roman Catholic Marian apparitions, including Fatima, and sees some things that are not in accord with Tradition:

Equally doubtful would be any suggestion of replacing “Christ our God, long-suffering, all-merciful, all-compassionate, Who loves the righteous and has mercy on sinners,” with a distant, impersonal figure of wrath, bent on punishment and vengeance. The apparition of La Salette said, “I can no longer hold back the heavy arm of my Son;” the apparition of Fatima: “… already He is deeply offended.” At San Damiano, 1961, ‘The Eternal Father is tired, very tired…. He has freed the Demon, who is working havoc. ” At Oliveto Citra, Italy, in 1985, again we hear, “I can no longer hold back the righteous arm of my Son.” The sayings echo the unbalanced but very popular teachings of some of the Latin saints and preachers of the past, whereby Christ’s Kingdom of justice was opposed to Mary’s Kingdom of Mercy. “If God is angry with a sinner, Mary takes him under her protection, she withholds the avenging arm of her Son and saves him” (Alphonsus Liguari). “She is the sure refuge of sinners and criminals from the rigour of the wrath and vengeance of Jesus Christ;” she “binds the power of Jesus Christ to prevent the evil He would do to the guilty” (Jean-Jacques Olier).

Absurdities from La Salette speak for themselves, with the apparition claiming that she had given the people six days for work and reserved the seventh for herself (l). Desmond Seward in The Dancing Sun states that:

According to the visionaries, the Virgin (of Medjugorje) has said that the world is passing through a period of unparalleled darkness…. Satan … is waging a great battle for souls with the Mother of God, who has been sent from the Eternal Father to warn and hearten them, for, as God told the serpent in Genesis, the woman “shall crush thy head.”

If so, this perpetuates the Roman Catholic mistranslation in the Douay Bible of Genesis, chapter 3, verse 15. It is not the woman, but the seed of the woman—Christ—Who will crush the serpent’s head, by His Passion and Resurrection.

The more cautious and sober Latin theologians have often been uneasy with the excesses of their contemporaries, but on many occasions the weight of popular enthusiasm has proved too strong for sound theology to prevail. Louie-Marie Grignion de Montfort (d. 1716)—a master of Marian excess—closely connected the Virgin to eschatology. With the Second Coming she must be revealed by the Holy Spirit so that Christ may be made known, and she must shine forth in power against the enemies of God, since in some way the devil fears her more than God Himself. The idea of the Virgin as always being the one who prepares the way for the coming of Christ—not only His first physical coming at the Incarnation, but of His coming into the souls of men, and of His Second Coming, has continued into modern times. “As there would have been no advent of Christ in the flesh in His first coming without Mary, so there can be no coming of Christ in spirit … without Mary again preparing the way.” “As she prepared His body, so now she prepares souls for His coming” (Archbishop Fulton Sheen). At Zeitoun, “one can perceive the salvific role of the Blessed Virgin in evidence, as it was at Fatima in 1917. This role is essentially that of preparing the way for her Divine Son, by opening the souls of mankind to His redeeming grace.” “…[H]aving prepared His way 2,000 years ago among His own people” she “now prepares His way into the souls of millions of Gentiles of all faiths and none with a new and greater Visitation” (Francis Johnston: When Millions Saw Mary). One wonders if there is anything left for the Holy Spirit to do.

This thinking accords well both with the current belief, prevalent in some Roman Catholic circles, in a Marian Age which is to precede the Second Coming, and with the strongly apocalyptic tone of the majority of the apparitions. But as such a role for the Mother of God is to be found neither in Scripture nor in Tradition, it inspires little confidence in the authenticity of the apparitions.

She also notes something about the Marian apparitions that has come up recently in various places – a pagan connection:

Within the Church, Christ [is] the Second Adam, but once the Virgin had been seen in a certain sense as the Second Eve (without, of course, the slightest surrender to paganism) this was likely to have recalled to the spiritually weak the Goddess-Son / Spouse relationship; while the title Theotokos, although solely concerned with teaching that Christ was God, might surely have evoked the memory of Cybele, Great Mother of the gods, except that this was in fact an even greater title, the Mother of God. As paganism crumbled and local deities were dethroned, it was more often than not the Mother of God who was put in their place as patroness of healing springs and holy mountains, for long centuries associated with pilgrimage. In the West, where the theological and liturgical foundation was perhaps weaker, during the Middle Ages “Our Lady” of one district came to take on an almost separate personality from the Virgin of a rival shrine. Sir Thomas More, the Roman Catholic Tudor martyr, commented, “They will make comparisons between our ladie of Ippiswitch and our ladie of Walsingham, as weening that one image hath more power than the other.”

Nothing like this happened in the East. Rooted soundly and soberly in the solid theology of Orthodoxy, and spiritually nourished by a vernacular liturgy, the Lord’s Mother fitted naturally into her rightful place in a perfectly balanced and harmonious whole. The Western distortion of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity resulting from the Filioque with its (almost unintentional) down-grading of the Holy Spirit, together with the historical events that overtook the Western Empire in the shape of the invasion of barbarian tribes and the resultant consequences, increasingly isolated the Church in the West from the pure Orthodoxy of the Church in the East.

With the restoration of order and stable government at the end of the Dark Ages, the Church in the West found itself with a largely illiterate and semi-barbarian laity. Churchmen had to supply the clerks and lawyers needed by the lay rulers. In consequence, the Papacy found itself relying on ecclesiastical lawyers, and this was to give the Roman Church the legalistic outlook and systematic philosophy which are its hallmarks. The ecclesiastical establishment acquired an overriding authority, and with the enforced celibacy of priests, “the Church” in common parlance came to mean the clergy. A faulty Trinitarian theology, and an undue emphasis on the Augustinian teachings on original sin and the Atonement, together with an all-male hierarchy, led to the loss of the feminine element in Western Christianity and created a “Goddess-shaped gap.” The Virgin Mary was the obvious candidate to fill that gap.

In contrast, the Tradition was handed on unchanged from generation to generation in the Eastern Church. Apart from the treacherous Fourth Crusade, the Roman Empire in the East remained unconquered until the arrival of the Turks. There was always an independent and highly-educated laity. With a powerful Emperor there was never any opportunity—nor was there any need or the desire—to subject all lay power to the authority of the Patriarch, and “the Church” continued to mean the whole body of the faithful, past and present, including the angels. Married priests ensured that the priesthood was not a class apart. (As today, the priest lives in the same kind of house as his parishioners—a village priest in Cyprus may also be the village bootmaker, and a Greek papas, in cassock and stove pipe hat may be seen clasping a small son or daughter with one hand and a shopping basket with the other). There was no Goddess-shaped gap to be filled in Orthodoxy, and anchored safely in Orthodox theology and hymnology, the holy Virgin, more honourable than the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim on account of her Divine Maternity, remained a woman with a human nature in all points like our own, completely purified by the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation in order that she might be able to give a human nature to the Eternal Logos.

In the Latin Church, Marian exaggeration soared to ever new heights, checked only briefly by the Protestant Reformation. The Virgin had “added certain perfection to the Maker of the universe” by giving Him a human nature—quite the opposite view from that taken by Scripture and Orthodoxy, which saw the Incarnation as a kenosis, a self-emptying, of Christ—”though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor.” Bernadine of Siena’s weirdest fantasy, the “seduction of God,” was described in language more appropriate to a Greek legend of Zeus than to the Great Mystery of the Incarnation. The Virgin was higher than the Church … she had authority over her Son in heaven … she appeased the Divine justice and prevented God from chastening sinners … she and the Holy Spirit produced Christ in souls. “Even the tongue of the Holy Spirit” was “scarcely sufficient to celebrate her praises worthily”! Unfortunately the authors and preachers of such offensive nonsense were frequently canonized, which was naturally taken as a sign of official approval. Such distortions could well be the stuff of which Marian apparitions are made. The Goddess, or at least a semi-divine being, had returned.

Mr. LeJeune also mentions the frightening behavior of the sun that is connected with Fatima: ‘ . . . there is the unmistakable miracle Mary had promised the children months before—an erratic, spinning crash of the sun toward Earth witnessed by 70,000 spectators who, of course, thought the end of the world was upon them.’  Ms. Lambouras ties in a warning about such signs with a warning about visions in general:

Discounting the natural phenomena, unless we believe that the “doves” and dancing suns are genuine signs from Heaven sent to confirm faith, to indicate the gracious presence of the Virgin, and to warn of disasters which can only be averted by repentance, then it seems we are left with the possibility of some kind of mass hallucination, or with part of a “signs and lying wonders” campaign in preparation for the Anti-Christ.

According to St. Luke’s Gospel, in the last times there will be “terrors and great signs from heaven.” St. Ignaty Brianchaninov, writing over a hundred years ago, warned that a time was approaching when there would be numerous and striking false miracles. “… the miracles of Anti-Christ will be chiefly manifested in the aerial realm, where satan chiefly has his dominion. These signs will act most of all on the sense of sight, charming and deceiving it. St John the Theologian, beholding in revelation the events that are to precede the end of the world, says that Anti-Christ will perform great signs, and will even ‘make fire to come down out of heaven upon the earth in the sight of men’ (Revelations 13:13). This is the sign indicated by Scripture as the highest of the signs of Anti-Christ and the place of this sign is the air.” Several of the apparitions have prophesied a Great Sign to come.

Why is it that these apparitions are accepted so readily by the visionaries themselves and by countless pilgrims? Heterodox Christians have very little idea of one of the key concepts of Orthodox ascetical teaching prelest—spiritual deception—whereby a mirage is mistakenly accepted for truth. There are many examples in the Lives of the Saints where monastics and ascetics, many of whom went on to achieve genuine holiness, fell into delusion, entertaining demons in the form of angels, and even “Christ” Himself, receiving “revelations,” seeing “light” in their cells and hearing “the Lord” speaking to them. Sometimes “Christ” granted them gifts of “prophecy’ and astonishing powers. St Diadochus of Photiki warned against accepting the deceit of the evil one under the form of light or some fiery form, and St. Symeon the New Theologian warned of evil spirits who cause many and various deceptions in the air.

Imageless prayer, as taught by the ascetics and elders of the Orthodox Church, is in direct contrast to that of, for instance, a person seeking help from a Protestant Healing Mission, who may be told at the prayer session preceding the healing service to imagine a golden light streaming down on him from heaven, and to the meditation practices common in the West for centuries, whereby one was encouraged to imagine a chosen scene and try to visualise the Child in the manger or the Crucified Christ. St Mark the Ascetic warns that “Once our thoughts are accompanied by images, we have already given them our assent.” This image-producing faculty may, in the spiritually advanced be used creatively, as in the iconography of St Andrei Rublev and devout iconographers generally, but time and again we are warned that those not yet possessing spiritual discrimination should beware of being enticed and led captive by illusory appearances.

What many Marian apparition enthusiasts do not realise is that spiritual phenomena are almost commonplace these days. The Pentecostal / Charismatic groups are very quick to identify their experiences with the Holy Spirit, just as the Protestant revivalists in Indonesia in the 1970’s unquestioningly accepted their “voices,” “angels” (invariably quoting Scripture by chapter and verse), visions of “Christ,” healings, miraculous lights accompanying evangelists, and mysterious fires from heaven that consumed Roman Catholic statues, as genuine. People who bring “Christian” ideas to their experiences often assume, all too readily, that they actually are Christian experiences, the work of the Holy Spirit, and they seldom pause to ask if they might possibly originate from quite another kind of spirit.

. . . Staretz Amvrossy of Optina, who as a great monastic [and] spiritual guide, was frequently asked for advice on visions and voices, relied on the basic teaching of the Fathers, and warned those who sought his guidance on such matters not to trust in voices heard during the time of prayer or in changes in the icons—fragrance or fiery flames coming from them—which might seem to be good, but to attach no significance to them as such things also come from the deceit of the enemy.

. . . Complete trust was given by the young people to the apparition of Medjugorje, a trust that would be encouraged by the Franciscans, who acted as their confidantes and spiritual directors. There was no concept of prelest, there seemed to be no recognition of the fearful darkness of the fallen mind. The same argument used to support the authenticity of Medjugorje—”the tree is known by its fruits”—fervent prayer, conversions, healings, sense of peace and joy—has been used by “Charismatics,” Protestant Revivalists, the Evangelicals in Indonesia, and various heretical movements throughout history. Hindus and Buddhists doubtless say the same thing as they point to the intense devotion of their own followers on mass pilgrimages to the temples, and the reported healings at the shrines of their own holy men.

St. Ignaty Brianchaninov, in his warning to Orthodox Christians, reminds us of the frightful danger of being deceived by evil spirits. “If the saints have not always recognized demons who appeared to them in the form of saints and Christ Himself, how is it possible for us to think of ourselves that we will recognize them without mistake! … The holy instructors of Christian struggle … command (us) not to trust any kind of image or vision if they should suddenly appear, not to enter into conversation with them …” but in resolute awareness of one’s unworthiness and unfitness for seeing holy spirits, to entreat God that He might protect us from all the nets and deceptions, which are cunningly set out for men by the spirits of malice.” … “The only correct entrance into the world of spirits is the doctrine and practice of Christian struggle. The only correct entrance into the sensuous perception of spirits is Christian advancement and perfection.”

The best attitude to have towards apparitions and signs like those at Fatima, according to Church Fathers through the centuries, is an extreme skepticism, not an eager, unquestioning, enthusiastic acceptance.  Ms. Lambouras concludes on this:

It is not the experiences that are in doubt, but the origin of the experiences, as visions may be caused by various psychological factors, natural psychic and mediumistic ability or demonic delusion. The demons do not hesitate to make full of our fallen intellects, false assumptions, spiritual pride, and psychologically based delusions, which is why the Church warns us, through the ascetics and great spiritual fathers, to be spiritually sober and constantly aware, lest self-deception turns into demonic deception.

There are too many solar signs. Ever since Fatima, solar phenomena have been a feature at most of the shrines—lights, fires, rainbows, dancing suns, showers of petals, fiery crosses, with a particularly dramatic display at Zeitoun. When to these are added the Protestant Revivalist signs—pillars of fire, “Christ” in the sky, clouds that follow evangelists and shelter them from heat, and all the earlier UFOs, one cannot help wondering if there is a programme afoot purposely geared to cater for a generation that seeks after signs—the demons obligingly providing what we are ready to receive. One or two visions and signs might be convincing, but not literally hundreds.

There is much more to Ms. Lambouras’s essay, and the reader is encouraged to read all of it if he can, but so as not to exhaust everyone, we will wrap up the quotes with this section near the end of it:

Who is this Lady who has appeared thousands of times and is acclaimed by millions’? Is she the Mother of God, whom we know within Orthodoxy from the Scriptures and the services and teachings of the Church? It is almost as if the Marian apparition cult has a life and ethos of its own, almost as if it were a separate religion—Christianity overlaid with the worship of the Goddess and spiritism. The Virgin, not Christ, is the central figure. Heaven speaks through her, not Him. Despite Rome’s official teaching, which still precludes placing Mary on a level with her Son, she is predominant. Geoffrey Ashe seems to have put his finger on it when he says that “the vitality of Christ’s own (R.C.!) Church has often seemed to depend on her rather than on Him.”

My sense of the autonomous Virgin, acting in her own right, was confirmed by Fr Michael O’Carroll, who says that God has chosen to entrust His mission of mercy and renewal to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Speaking of Medjugorje, he says, “It was not God the Father, nor God the Son incarnate, nor God the Holy Spirit who took the initiative at Medjugorje. It was Our Lady.” He goes on to say that the main feature of Medjugorje is the manifestation of the “dominant, continuing, utterly self-assured role given to Our Lady.”

He seeks to reassure those who feel that God has been displaced at Medjugorje by speaking of the Gospa’s “recurring mention of the Holy Spirit.” In the two hundred and three messages I read, the Holy Spirit was mentioned just six times, twice in a way that made Him merely a witness to the Gospa—”I am inviting you, dear children, to pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit which you need so as to witness to my presence and all that I am giving you…. The Spirit of truth is necessary for you in order to convey the messages just as I give them to you.”

Fr O’Carroll’s “assurance” is couched in terms that will sound very strange to Orthodox ears. “The recurring mention of the Holy Spirit is notable and accords well with the revival, within the last lifetime, of doctrine and devotion about him: he was always part of the Christian creed, accepted by believers, honoured in certain common prayers.” He adds significantly, “But it is not so long since a spiritual work about him appeared with the title ‘The Forgotten Paraclete,’ or since a great master of the spiritual life, Dom Columba Marmion, could assert that for some the attitude would be that expressed in an important text in Acts: ‘We have not even heard if there be a Holy Spirit.”‘ This confirmed my earlier reference to the Latin filioque with its subsequent downgrading of the Holy Spirit, and the large part I believe this distortion of Trinitarian doctrine has played in the Marian apparitions. The need for the Eternal feminine lies deep in the human psyche. That need is met in the Holy Trinity, the heart of Orthodoxy. Where Trinitarian teaching is unbalanced, and the Holy Spirit neglected, the Goddess is likely to re-emerge either under the form of Marian excess, or in the guise of Gnosticism, with its demand for women priests and inclusive language for God.

In the New Testament we see the incomparable spiritual beauty of the Mother of the Lord. In her shining humility she always points away from herself. Mother of the Messiah, she humbly refers to herself as God’s handmaiden. Her kinswoman Elizabeth’s praise of her is immediately referred to God, Who has regarded her lowliness. She does not presume to issue her own orders to the servants at Cana, but quietly advises them to obey her Son’s instructions. The Acts leaves her not engaged in some private initiative, but waiting in prayer with the whole body of the believers.

The lady of all the apparitions, by contrast, remains firmly centre stage, with the spotlight fixed permanently on herself. She decrees new titles for herself: The Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of the Rosary, Mother of Consolation, Virgin of the Poor, Queen of Peace. She seeks amendment and consolation for injuries done to herself:—”Dry the tears on my face, which I pour down as I observe what you do” (Medjugorje), “Look at my Heart, surrounded with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce me at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. There are so many souls whom the Justice of God condemns for sins committed against me that I have come to ask for reparation: sacrifice yourself for this intention” (Fatima).

Authentic imagery of the Most Holy Theotokos with her most Holy Son

In Goddess-language, the Lady of Medjugorje tells us, “I am tireless, I am calling you even when you are far from my heart. I am the Mother, and though I feel pain for everyone who goes astray, I forgive easily and I rejoice for every child who comes to me.” She appeared on the mountain with five angels in 1986, declaring to the visionaries that what they were experiencing was “like the Transfiguration on Mt Tabor.” She would give the people all the graces they needed. She blessed them and told them to “go down from Tabor and take the blessing to others.” “Wherever I come, my Son is with me,” she says. The truth is, that where the God-Man is, so also, in Him, His Mother, His saints, His angels and His righteous ones are present. In Him—and only in Him—we have fellowship with them and ask their help. His Mother is truly Mother of us all in the Church, where she holds the most exalted position, closest to Christ, but she does not act independently from Him. She is not the Mother of the Church, nor the Mediatrix of all graces, nor the Co-Redemptrix—both these latter titles being implicit throughout the Medjugorje messages.

In light of all the above, the Roman Catholics do not have the better claim to being the faithful guardians of Tradition.  Rather, they have allowed distortions and innovations to enter in.  And if this is the case with the greater thing (religion), the lesser one (politics) is in danger of corruption, too.  Thus, for those in the several States looking for a religion to undergird and give stability to their political traditions, the Orthodox Church would be the best option.

And they will find that once they begin their journey down the path of Orthodox Tradition, they will encounter a number of wonderful and surprising things about politics.

–Walt Garlington is an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland.  His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.